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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

"aLinux now uses a graphical installer; tons of bug fixes and many system init script updates to make the boot process quicker; RPM Manager now defaults to LZMA compressed archives aka XZ; while we fully transition to LZMA which is fully supported as of aLinux 14.0 there are still a few GZIP remnants that might not work as they once did, like in earlier Midnight Commanders; system - X.Org 7.5, KDE 3.5.10, KOffice 1.6.3, Linux kernel 2.6.34, GNOME 2.14.3, Perl 5.10.0, glibc 2.5, GCC 4.1.2, PHP 5.2.0 and MySQL 5.0.33; by default aLinux on X Window / KDE can view most common and not so common Unicode, UTF-8, ISO-10646 font/glyph locales in applications such as Konqueror, Firefox, SeaMonkey, GVim, Kedit, Konsole."

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 1

Pros:

Cons:

Seriously broken

I started with the live CD. This was rather slow and started with a program running (GKrellM) that had to be killed manually. Attempting to alter the theme crashed KDE. The menu was huge and ill-laid out; i.e. there are 5 terminals available, including one that has pale grey text on white!

The installation was simple, despite the warning that it was "not for the feint (sic) hearted". The only problems were that although it said you could skip installing Grub, there was no means of doing so, and although I opted for not altering the MBR, it still did it.

When I rebooted, I found that the network had to be set up manually. To do that I needed to be root, and that meant setting a root password. The configuration tool for this is broken, and it altered the user password instead. I then tried to set a root password by starting in single-user mode, but that too is broken: it asks for a root password!

A trip to the user forum showed just 50 users; I think it's time this vintage distro was allowed to die in peace.